Facebook does right thing, listens to disgruntled feedback

With every Facebook redesign come the inevitable subset of users who fear …

Facebook's new homepage brings a streamlined look while shifting some functionality

Like Wayne and Garth, Facebook's users have typically feared change. With each major feature addition and redesign, a subset of users have cried out in horror and formed various groups in protest (for all that those are worth). Facebook has typically forged ahead without looking back, but the foot stomping over its latest changes was loud enough to make the massive social network have a slight change of heart.

To make a long story short, Facebook obfuscated a lot of activity from the news feed—the main homepage column that contains updates from friends—with its latest redesign earlier this month (which, for those keeping count, followed less than a year after the previous redesign). Before, users saw everything their friends shared, such as photos, new friendships, and activity from third-party sites via Facebook Connect. With the redesign, much of this activity has either been removed from the news feed or left up to a popularity algorithm for the Highlights section, the column on the right. But that section only contains so many items and does not update very often, creating the fundamental problem that the redesign's critics are kicking dust over.

Some users accuse Facebook of chasing the conversational simplicity of Twitter. The social messaging service recently touted year-over-year growth of 900 percent in active users versus Facebook's reported 149 percent growth. Others complain that Facebook has scrapped much of the incentive to use its service, since users can no longer see a lot of what their friends are up to, and all the potential of Facebook Connect has been thrown to the redesign wind.

In a post on the official Facebook blog, the company has acknowledged the uproar over the changes and elaborated on a number of forthcoming tweaks designed to bring balance back to the news feed. Most importantly, Facebook will be "giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream." Meredith Chin, Facebook's Manager of Corporate Communications, could not confirm to Ars whether this meant the return of the granular and much-missed "Story Options" control panel.

In conjunction with more control over what you see in Facebook's news feed, the Highlights algorithm is also being improved to update more frequently and display more content throughout the day. Other forthcoming changes include easier ways to create Friends List filters (found in the new left column) and an option to turn on live updating so users no longer have to manually refresh the page. In a nutshell, "we just have to figure out the right balance between letting people share and consume in the right way," Chin explained.

The changes are set to appear in "the next several weeks," and we'll have to see whether their implementation is satisfactory to the frustrated masses. As Facebook becomes an increasingly dominant social player with over 174 million users around the globe, it picked probably the perfect time to listen to those users. With previous iterations, Facebook was still exploring the dynamics of social media interaction. This latest redesign silenced much of that potential.